Making Sugar Mountain4:23

Four Aussies get dropped onto a remote Alaskan glacier for a month, and make this awesome ski movie. Courtesy: Sol Republic

August 14th 2014

3 years ago

/display/newscorpaustralia.com/Web/NewsNetwork/Travel - News.com.au/

THIS is sweet on so many levels. This is some of the greatest ski footage you’ll ever see but it’s more than that. It’s friendship, bonding, Walmart, glaciers, coffee, “slednecks”, cutting-edge drone technology, pineapples, reindeer sausage and a whole lot more.

Here’s the deal. In April and May this year, four Aussies did an excellent ski adventure in Alaska. They filmed their trip, but this was no average ski movie. This ski movie, created in collaboration with SOL REPUBLIC, would have footage from close-up angles never previously imagined. That’s where the drones come in.

One of the four Aussies, Oscar McLennan, was into robotics. He put the group in touch with a US company making lightweight drones. Long story short, they bought two prototypes and learned to fly them.

Dude, meet drone. Drone, meet dude.Source:news.com.au

Now, all they had to do was set-up camp on a remote glacier, climb some untouched slopes and start taking their amazing ski footage. This was easier said than done. Everything is easier said than done on an Alaskan glacier.

Example. It takes three hours to brew a simple cup of coffee. Yes, three hours. We’ll let Sydney-based skier and TV cameraman Tim Myers, pick up the story.

“We went to Alaska in one of lowest snow years in 10 years,” he explains. “That made glacier travel a lot more treacherous because the snow bridges hadn’t formed. “Originally we planned to go to the Chugach [a famed steep back country range] but it didn’t look as good as we hoped.

“We spotted this other area, a glacier called the Shoup Glacier out of the town of Valdez. We didn’t see another person the whole time we were there. That’s good because snowmobiling is getting huge up there and we didn’t want anywhere the slednecks could access.”

Ah, so that’s what a sledneck is. A redneck on a snowmobile. As for the coffee that takes three hours to brew, Tim Myers says that’s just just how long it takes when it’s minus 19 and you’re in a tent and you have to melt snow for water. You might bear that in mind next time you grumble about the five minute line-up and smarmy hipster barista at your favourite coffee joint.

Oh yeeeaaaah. That’s what it’s all about.Source:news.com.au

Myers and his gang of three fellow skiers and three film crew members spent 30 days on that Alaskan glacier. On clear days they climbed, skied and filmed. On bad weather days they huddled through blizzards and ate bacon, pasta and reindeer sausage washed down with the occasional slug of whisky.

One day the plane flew in with Alaskan salmon, strawberries, a bag of oranges and a fresh pineapple. “My body didn’t know what to do with itself,” Myers recalls. “It’s all about small things out there.”

Waaiiit! Don’t go. Just one more pack of gummy bears. Pleeeeease!Source:news.com.au

One thing that made life on the glacier interesting, apart from the constant creaking of the ice below, was the lack of connection to the outside world.

“It was unique. How often do you just talk to seven other people,” Myers says. “No one was looking at phones, no one was uploading on Instagram. We solved a lot of life problems by just talking. Actually we forgot all our life problems. We had our routine and that got us through the day.”

In the last week of shooting, the whole team was bailed up by a massive storm. When it cleared, there was perfect snow, perfect light and just enough food to last until the plane returned. The end result is Sugar Mountain. If you haven’t watched the attached clip, watch it now. It’s pretty amazing stuff even if you’re not that into the snow.

One of the guys tries a rare triple back flip with pike... better known as a massive stack.Source:news.com.au

Myers, by the way, is now back in Australia earning a living again as a roving cameraman. He says it’s always hard coming back to earth after such an amazing adventure, but the moment he really knew he wasn’t in the wilderness anymore was when he went to Walmart in the Alaskan city of Anchorage.

“It was like coming back from moon and doing a garbage run to to tip,” he says.

Just quietly, we think that analogy’s a little unfair. Everyone knows you don’t dump garbage at Walmart. As for what you purchase there… that’s another story entirely.

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